The Calculus of Consequences

The trolley speeds toward five workers. You can pull the lever and kill one instead. Your hand is on the switch. Consequentialism says pull it. The numbers are clear. But is that all there is to right and wrong?

Consequentialism judges actions by what they bring about. You look forward, not backward. The right choice is the one that leaves the world better than the alternatives would have.

Mill's utilitarianism fills in the details. Happiness is the thing to maximize. It includes pleasure and the absence of pain, but higher pleasures (reading, friendship, justice) count more than lower ones (food, sex) when experienced people choose between them. You can apply it act by act or through general rules. Either way, you add up the happiness for everyone affected. No one's happiness counts more than anyone else's.

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. [...] Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.

— John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter 2 (1861)

Mill opens with the greatest happiness principle in one clean sentence. The quality test is practical: ask people who know both pleasures which one they would choose even if it brings more pain. Utilitarianism avoids crude hedonism while staying true to consequences.

In 1950s Britain the government considered whether to keep the death penalty. Utilitarians argued the evidence showed it did not deter murder more than life imprisonment and caused unnecessary suffering to innocent families. The net happiness calculation favored abolition. Parliament ended capital punishment for murder in 1965.

You can save five lives by killing one innocent person. The numbers say yes. Your stomach says no. Does the framework force you to silence your stomach, or does that show something is missing?